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Fantastic Fest Awards Include 'A Boy And His Samurai' & 'You're Next'

It's already over? Fantastic Fest 2011, held in Austin, TX at the Alamo Drafthouse, is coming to a close in the next few days. To wrap-up the fest, they've announced this year's Fantastic Fest Awards, ranging from Audience favorites including Adam Wingard's highly buzzed about You're Next and Yoshihiro Nakamura's A Boy And His Samurai, as well as jury prizes for just about everything, from AMD & Dell's "Next Wave" Spotlight to Horror and Fantasy prizes as well. There are well over 100 films playing here, mostly obscure, foreign titles, or genre films, but these awards should be a guide for what to keep an eye on from this fest.

The juries were comprised of some of the most esteemed filmmakers, critics, festival directors and show biz people in the industry. Their thoughtful deliberations provided the following acknowledgments of cinematic excellence in all things Fantastic. Here's the complete list of awards winners for Fantastic Fest 2011:

AUDIENCE AWARD:A Boy And His Samurai (Yoshihiro Nakamura)Runners-Up:You're Next, Juan Of The Dead

The audience awards are presented by accounting firm Maxwell Locke & Ritter, who provided the certified tabulation of ballots this year and are the exclusive accounting sponsor of Fantastic Fest. AMD and Dell are the presenters of prestigious "Next Wave" Awards, which honor emerging filmmakers. The winner of the "Next Wave" feature award is presented with $1,000 and a Dell multimedia laptop provided by AMD. The Fantastic Fest Awards ceremony is also presented by the Texas Motion Picture Alliance, who advocate for film, video, commercial, interactive, and digital media production inside the state of Texas.

Good choices this year, for the most part, although there seems to be a very large amount of random winners listed in the follow-up categories. We've been buzzing about You're Next here on FirstShowing already, with some very glowing thoughts in Tim's audio reviews. I also just saw A Boy And His Samurai and totally loved it, it's certainly deserving of the Audience Award win. Bullhead just started showing yesterday and I've been hearing good buzz about it from those who've seen it as well. You can find all of our Fantastic Fest coverage here and more info one of the world's biggest and best genre film festival at FantasticFest.com.